Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America (20 page)

He heard a sound coming from down the corridor and hid in the frame of a doorway. An older KGB officer rounded the corner and Rock threw a hand over his mouth and dragged him into the shadows. He slammed the muzzle of the machine pistol into the man’s spine.

“Where’s the girl?” he said pulling the crook of his arm tightly around the Red’s throat.

“The who?” the officer said weakly, trying to breathe through Rockson’s grip.

“Don’t play games with me, mister. I have nothing to lose. Once more I ask you where’s the girl? This time you die.” He pushed the gun hard against the man’s spine. The officer winced in pain. It felt like his back was about to be snapped in two.

‘I’ll tell. Don’t kill me, Rockson,” the chalky-faced major said. “She’s in room three seventy-one. Next floor up at the other end.”

“Thanks,” Rock said sincerely and slammed the man as hard as he could in the side of the head with the butt of the pistol. The man slammed down to the floor, out for hours if not forever.

Rock headed toward the elevator, trying to turn his head down as he passed a guard stationed by the lobby doors of the ten running elevator cars. The guard barely noticed, glancing up mindlessly and then looking down again at a dirty magazine imported from Moscow hidden behind a rule and regulations book of the Red Army. Rock still didn’t quite understand the mix of KGB and regular Red Army troops. Apparently Killov had taken over, yet he permitted many Red Army officers and guards to roam and work the fortress. They’re all scared, Rockson decided. When the KGB comes knocking they knuckle under. Killov’s got them all under his spell of fear. The man was creating his own legend—of death and destruction.

Rock emerged on the third floor and quickly found the direction to the room. There! Three seventy-one. On the other side he could hear gruff male laughter. They were already playing with her. God help every man in there, Rock thought grimly as he opened the door and burst inside, a pistol held forward in each hand.

Kim was in the center of the room, naked and trussed up on a wooden X, her hands and legs tied wide apart. But nothing had happened yet, Rock could see instantly, beyond verbal humiliation. She was fully conscious, unmarked, and defiant. Six men stood around her, two beginning to unbuckle their pants. One, an officer with a black eyepatch over his right eye, turned.

“So, Yuri,” he said, thinking he recognized the officer behind the dark sunglasses, “you couldn’t stay away, heh.” His expression changed suddenly from a sneer to terror. “You! You!” he croaked, backing slowly away.

“Yeah me, fellows. I thought I’d join you, too. Show you how an American does it.” He flipped the machine pistols onto automatic and pulled the triggers back on both of them. He sprayed death in front of him and to the left where the six were grouped together, laughing a moment before in the male bravado. The twin hails of slugs ripped across the six like laser beams ripping at their stomachs and leaving a bloody trail of intestine and blood which poured out onto the red-and-black checkered floor. They slid down into their own red blood and lay there unmoving.

Rock ran past the mangled red things that had been men and cut Kim’s bonds. She put her hands over her breasts, ashamed and shivering slightly in the cold. Rock stripped off the clothes of one of the dead men and slipped the two large uniform over her slim firm body.

“We’ve got one chance in hell, Kim. You’ve got to do everything I say instantly, without question. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get out of here.”

“I will, Rock,” Kim said, wiping away a few salty tears and standing straight up. “Trust me,” she added softly, smiling at the sight of Rock’s handsome face and powerful, muscled body right in front of her. She threw her arms around his chest, gripping him with all her strength. “Do you realize we’ve never even held each other?” She laughed and kissed his neck. He squeezed her tightly, feeling more in love with this young female every second. There was something about her. She was so direct and honest like Rockson himself. And loving . . . and beautiful. He had never felt some of the emotions that were going through him. Rona had always been very special to him and extremely attractive. Their sexual encounters had always been highly pleasurable. And yet . . . There was something between them that was different, something chemical, something electrical, like magnets pulling each other closer.

“I love you,” he said, kissing her hair that smelled like the sweetest fruit.

“And I y—” There was a sudden commotion outside in the hallway. He ripped her away from him, throwing her to the floor as a stream of submachine-gun bullets neatly scissored their way through the glass partition of the door. Rock waited until he heard voices nervously telling each other in Russian to go in and check. He took out the other pellet he had taken from the dead freefighter’s heel—a small explosive charge and set the timer for three seconds. Rock heaved it through the shattered shards of glass still hanging on the door and dove on top of Kim. The explosion rattled the walls deafening the two Americans for a few seconds. Before the roar of death had finished echoing down the halls of the mindbreaking building, Rock was heading through the splintered door dragging Kim behind him. The hallway outside was a butcher shop of blood and splattered guts. Not a man remained alive in the group who had come to get him. Jesus Christ! Shecter’s little toys were getting more and more powerful. Kim almost vomited as she slipped on what looked like a spine covered with a slushy red slime.

“There’s no time to be sick, baby,” Rock said firmly as they moved at a half run down the long hallway. “Nor time to faint, or waver. We must live, Kim! Both of us. I don’t care about my life. I’m just another American freefighter doing his best. Death’s been on my shoulder for years. But you can’t die. I can’t let you. There’s too much beauty in you. Too much life in this world of death.” He looked at her sharply as they rounded a corner. Her pale color brightened slightly and her face took on the flushed pink of anger and the will to survive.

“I’m with you, Rock, all the way. And I can’t bear to think of life without you either. We must both survive.”

They rounded the end of one of the long mazelike halls. Two officers came running at them with their rifles pushed forward like spears, ready to fire. More bells began ringing all around them. The two stared wide-eyed in surprise at Rockson who reacted with the speed of a lightning bolt. He slammed the butt of his machine pistol up into the nose of the closer man, driving the nasal bone up and into the man’s brain. Rock turned without a second look at the falling man and pushed the barrel of the pistol into the second man’s stomach as the elite forces’ officer raised his rifle. Rock pulled the trigger and let the gun shake for a few seconds before he lowered it. The would-be killer slumped to the floor.

Rockson was enraged now. He barely felt the Reds were human anymore after their treatment of Kim. He wouldn’t let the bastards harm her—or any other American in this damned brain destroying building. He didn’t want to just kill them—he wanted to destroy them. To obliterate them, the whole stinking lot. Rock lifted one of the dead man’s Trakhov 7.2mm service revolvers, wiped the blood from the handle and gave it to Kim.

“Use it, baby, if you have to.” She held the big weapon in her small white hands and put her finger on the trigger.

“I’m ready, Rock, and if they catch us again I’ll use it on myself before I let them take me prisoner.”

“Don’t talk like that, Kim,” Rock said angrily. “Don’t even think like that.” He pulled her and ran toward the third floor lobby and the elevators. He had heard some of the guards talking and knew that the mindbreaking equipment was on the twentieth through the thirtieth floors. He pressed the up button on the elevator panel and within seconds the doors of one swung open. So far so good. The automatic shutdown systems hadn’t had time to go on yet. He pressed twenty and put his finger on the trigger of the machine pistol. The doors sprang open and Rockson jumped out the moment the shiny stainless doors flew open and sprayed the machine pistol around the floor. Screams and sounds of bodies hitting hard surfaces was the only reply. When he pulled his finger from the trigger, bodies lay strewn haphazardly around like broken dolls covered with red paint. Whoever had been lying in wait, their own guns drawn, had received a murderous surprise, Ted Rockson style. He bent down and stripped the bodies of their weapons, six pistols and three submachine guns and loads of extra ammunition. They’d need every bit of firepower they could muster—Rock knew that a war lay ahead of them.

Alarms began ringing out everywhere, hideous squeals of warning throughout the building. They had minutes at most before this floor, too, would be filled with the KGB and this time they wouldn’t be taken so easily. Kim helped Rock to carry the additional weapons and clenched her lips tightly as they stepped across the still twitching bodies. They sped down the main hall, their arms absolutely filled with destruction. They came to a large wooden door with a small glass window at eye level. Rock’s sixth sense told him that someone, more than one, probably was just the other side. He stood back and set the submachine gun on full auto and sprayed a line back and forth across the door three times. He dove through the door, hitting the floor in a roll and somersaulting over. He came to a stop again, facing the door, his submachine gun ready to release another volley of death. But there was no need. At least not for these two. He had been right: Two Red Army regulars had been waiting—they waited too long.

Kim ran in and joined Rockson and they moved forward cautiously. They turned the corner and came to one of the holding pens that the Reds stuffed their prisoners in while waiting their turn to be brainwashed. Nearly four hundred American workers cowered behind the bars, sullen, terrified, staring at the half-naked nymph and heavily muscled man.

“What the hell?” they exclaimed as one when they saw Rockson draw up to them on the run. In his uniform and sunglasses he looked like just another of the Red officers.

“Stand back,” he yelled over the murmur of the prisoners. “I’m here to help you, not to hurt you.” They looked distrustfully at this strange man, his black clothes covered with blood and the blond-haired girl at his side. “Back! Back!” Rock yelled. “There’s no time to play games.” The workers pulled to the back part of the cell, crunching against one another. Rock held the muzzle of the submachine gun to the lock, and, turning his head away, fired ten rounds into the mechanism. The door flew open and the prisoners filed out of their cell, scared but happy to be free at least for a moment from the fate that they all now knew awaited them in the mindbreaking machines just down the hall.

Rock stepped into the center of the confused prisoners and yelled for them to be quiet. “Listen to me. Listen carefully. We have only minutes. I’m here to help you live. You were all about to be destroyed as men. I know you’ve grown up in the Russian fortress cities, most of you, and you’re used to obeying the authorities. I’m not here to criticize you for that—but now you must fight. They were going to destroy your brains, use your bodies for their filthy work. For the first time in your lives you must fight back. You may all die, every one of you.
We
may all die but we are Americans and there are things worse than death. The time to strike back, to rebel is here!”

The workers looked at one another nervously. Their whole lives had been spent kowtowing to the Reds. They had been born in slavery, brought up in slavery, sent to work in the Russian factories when they were twelve. They had been nearly crushed, nearly but not completely.

“Are you—the Rockson?” one of the prisoners, a large balding man in prison grays sizes too small for him, asked.

“Yes, I’m Ted Rockson—I’m here to free you.”

“The Rockson,”
several of them half screamed. The man who had lived in their most secret dreams their entire lives, the man whose name was scrawled on the crumbling walls of every ghetto in America.

“The Ultimate American,” several gasped, their eyes as wide as if they had just seen an angel descending down from the heavens. They had all heard of him. Every single worker in America had. And though they had prayed he existed and would someday come to free them—in their guts they had feared he was not real. No man could fight the Reds with all the strength they had, all their armies and weapons.

But Rockson had. And now he was here! For them! He had come to save
them!

“We are with you, Rockson,” said one of the largest prisoners, an obvious brawler, with a black eye and bruised knuckles. “Give me a gun!” He walked up to Rock, who could see the cold respect in the man’s eyes. He had killed already—Russians, Rock knew. He handed the man a submachine gun and five clips.

“Here, you put the—”

“I know how to shoot it,” the prisoner cut him off curtly.

“Good,” Rockson said. He could count on this one. The other prisoners stepped forward, slowly at first, and then more of them, their eyes and voices growing louder, brighter by the second. For the first time in their lives there was hope. They took the weapons that Rock and Kim handed out, and Rock gave a thirty second course in firing them.

“We must get more weapons—many more. And free
all
the prisoners in this hellhole. Then we can fight our way out. Every Red we kill means another rifle and pistol for us, so let’s spread out. Move in groups of ten. If one man falls take his gun and fight on. Many of us will die—but as men. AS MEN!” Rock yelled out. The prisoners cheered him, raising their pistols and rifles in the air. They echoed his words back, rising in ever louder choruses.

“As men! As men! As men!”

“You Americans come with me,” Rockson said, picking the strongest and meanest looking of the lot. “You’ll work with me. Ours will be the hardest job.” The men’s faces lit up with pride that the Rockson had chosen them.

The workers tore off in all directions, down the hallways, onto the other floors, killing and grabbing more and more weapons from the Reds who were not prepared for the desperation, the violence, of the prisoners’ attack. Rock heard the shots ringing out everywhere and smiled a blade-thin grin. The Reds would be feeling something they weren’t used to—Fear!